Thomas Richard Nash, a 15-year-old who, in September 1895, killed himself by drinking carbolic acid: the Leeds Times reported that his box of belongings contained "a number of books of the penny dreadful description, dealing with daggers and poisons, guillotines, scaffolds etc".
When it comes to Vietnam, Valenti's Johnson is a reluctant and finally agonized war maker, begging for contrarian viewpoints and telling the author that reading casualty reports is "like drinking carbolic acid every morning".
She met kids like Adam, who celebrated his bar mitzvah at the Whisky A Go Go, and Erin, whose social life consisted of drinking, dropping acid, and "tweaking" on crystal meth.
The timing of his birth was "awkward," as he put it in his most famous poem, "The Portrait": several weeks earlier, his father had killed himself by drinking carbolic acid in a public park, leaving his mother, Yetta Jasspon Kunitz, with two daughters, six and three, and Stanley imminent.
Her family, who lived on the Upper East Side, thought they were superior to the Knopfs, in part because of a scandal that leaked into the papers: in 1896, Alfred's mother was caught by her husband in an affair and, when he refused to forgive her, killed herself by drinking carbolic acid.
Jutting out from several razed lots on the block between Houston and East First Street is the high brick tenement that used to be McGurk's Suicide Hall: a bar/brothel that became notorious 100 years ago as a place where despondent prostitutes went to kill themselves, sometimes by drinking carbolic acid.
In October 1931, his mother committed suicide by drinking hydrochloric acid.
Similarly, the tragic story of 31-year-old Maria Concetta Cacciola – who, in 2012, was found dead in her mobster parents' Rosarno home after allegedly drinking muriatic acid the same week she was planning to escape – became a symbol of the fight against the mafia.
(Imagine drinking Muriatic acid).
